Recruitment Crisis Prompts Millom [Cumbria] BUPA Practice Closure
- Details
- Published: Monday, 11 April 2022 08:32
- Written by Guy Tuggle
- Hits: 2293
![Recruitment Crisis Prompts Millom [Cumbria] BUPA Practice Closure](https://www.gdpuk.com/images/2019/res/millom.png)
In a worrying move for all its patients who depend on NHS dentistry, BUPA has closed a practice in the town of Millom, citing an inability to recruit dentists for the closure.
On 31st March BUPA Dental Care in St Georges Street, Millom, closed its doors for the final time. Millom is located north of Barrow-in-Furness and twenty-six miles south of Whitehaven on the edge of the Lake District National Park. The town is acknowledged for having a low wage economy.
Local paper The Mail in South Cumbria reported that the move risked leaving the majority of the town’s population with ‘no dental support’.
Claire Pearson, Regional Operations Director at Bupa Dental Care, said: “We’ve taken the difficult decision to close our dental practice in Millom. Despite our best efforts we’ve been unable to recruit permanent dentists to our Millom practice due to the critical national shortage of dentists to deliver NHS care”.
BUPA was working to help secure access according to Pearson. “I’d like to assure patients that we’re working with the NHS to help them find a new dentist.”
How successful any initiatives will be is not clear. Trudy Harrison, the local MP was ‘working with government ministers to address the ongoing issues of local provision of dental treatment in the area’ but sympathetic words are of no comfort to patients who rely on the service today. NHS England too had, according to the MP, been working to ‘review access to NHS dental care across North and West Cumbria, with a view to an increase in capacity, so they can begin to address these issues round access to services’.
Several residents told The Mail of the difficulties they had encountered trying to access NHS dental appointments, including for their children. And in an ominous statement which could describe the difficulties across swathes of the UK, local Gary Harvey said “what dentist would want to come up to the back of beyond? There are better pickings down south.”
Whilst NHS England and the BDA wrestle with targets for Q1 and chew the cud of contract reform there’s mounting evidence that postcodes are assuming an ever-increasing barrier to delivery. And with an acknowledged shortage of NHS dentists, GDPUK has yet to see any proposals of how that barrier may be addressed.
You need to be logged in to leave comments.
Report